[Note: These are the notes for a sermonette given to the combined brethren of several United Church of God congregations in Kaizer, Oregon on the Feast of Trumpets, Sabbath September 12, 2026.]

Good afternoon, brethren.  I hope you all had a good lunch and are awake and alert for the afternoon’s messages.  Yesterday afternoon I was informed that the afternoon messages today were originally intended to be split sermons but no one informed either of us who are speaking this afternoon, so we both assumed that it was a regular service, so I prepared a sermonette and the other speaker prepared a sermon.  I hope no one is disappointed either way about this. 

Everyone here knows the command that put this day on the calendar. Leviticus 23 tells us the first day of the seventh month is a memorial of teruah, and Numbers 29 calls it simply yom teruah, a day of teruah. If your Bible marks supplied words in italics, you will notice that “of blowing of trumpets” is the translators’ help, not the text. No instrument is named in either place.

That silence is worth stopping over, because Hebrew is not short of words for trumpet. There is the shofar, the curved ram’s horn that sounded at Sinai and that Gideon’s three hundred carried into the valley. There is the chatsotserah, the pair of hammered silver trumpets spoken of in Numbers 10, priestly instruments with a written protocol governing who blew them and when. There is the yobel, tied to the jubilee spoken of in Leviticus 25. God could have said “a day of blowing the shofar,” and we would know exactly what was in view, exactly who was to blow it, and exactly what it would sound like. He did not.

Instead He named the day with a word that is not an instrument at all. Teruah comes from the verb rua’, which means to raise a loud noise — to shout, to raise a cry, to make a racket together. Teruah is a sound, not a thing. It can come out of a horn and it can come out of a throat, and in Scripture it does both, sometimes in the same verse. So this day is named not for what is blown but for what is heard. And if we want to know what God meant by naming it this way, the honest approach is to go find out what a teruah meant to Israel the rest of the year.

I want to take you to four places where that word turns up — four passages that are not the ones you are likely to hear from this pulpit today, and that together show you how wide this word runs.

First, a teruah is the sound a people make over a king.

Balaam, hired to curse, could not stop himself from describing Israel accurately in Numbers 23:21.  Numbers 23:21 reads:

“He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel: the LORD his God is with him, and the shout of a king is among them.”

“The shout of a king” is teruat melekh — the teruah that belongs to a king. Notice what Balaam has to hold together in one sentence. The reason there is a royal shout in that camp is that the LORD their God is with them. The shout is not what produces the King’s presence; it is the noise a people make because the King is already there. A hired prophet standing on a hilltop, looking down at tents, could hear it.

Second, a teruah can be loud and hollow at the same time.

Israel had just been beaten by the Philistines, and rather than repent, they sent to Shiloh for the ark.  We read what happened after this in 1 Samuel 4:5-6.  1 Samuel 4:5-6 reads:

“And when the ark of the covenant of the LORD came into the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again. And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shout, they said, What meaneth the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews?”

That is a teruah — a great one. The ground shook with it. The enemy heard it and was afraid. And it was worthless. Israel lost thirty thousand men that day, the ark was captured, and Eli’s sons died. The shout had every outward mark of the shout at Jericho (yet another example, but one we are not turning to today) and none of the substance, because the men making the shout were treating the ark as a lucky object rather than submitting to the God whose covenant was inside it. The volume was real; the relationship was not.

This is the passage I would most want us to sit with on a day named for shouting. It is entirely possible to make the right noise on the right day with the wrong heart, and to be heard by everyone except God. A teruah proves nothing by itself. Numbers 23 tells us what makes it worth anything: the LORD his God is with him.

Third, a teruah is something you offer while the trouble is still going on.

David writes about teruah in Psalm 27:6, with enemies still around him and no deliverance yet visible.  Psalm 27:6 reads:

“And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the LORD.”

“Sacrifices of joy” is zivchei teruah — sacrifices of shouting. Two things stand out. It is a sacrifice, meaning it costs something and is deliberately brought. And it is offered by a man whose enemies are described in the present tense, round about him. He is not shouting because the siege lifted. He is shouting because he is certain of who will lift it.

That is what the shout at Jericho actually was, when those walls came tumbling down, though we usually remember it backwards. The people shouted before the wall moved. Faith makes noise ahead of the evidence, or it is not faith, but rather gratitude.

Fourth, a teruah can have weeping inside it.

When the foundation of the second temple was laid, the returned exiles raised the shout in Ezra 3:11 and 13.  Ezra 3:11 and 13 read:

“And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid… and now skipping down to verse 13: So that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people: for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off.”

The old men who had seen Solomon’s house wept, because they knew what had been lost and could see how small this one was. The younger men shouted, because they had never seen anything and this was the best day of their lives. Ezra’s point is that from a distance you could not tell the two apart. One sound, two hearts, both of them honest.

I find that to be a mercy and a comfort. Some of us come to a feast day with unmixed gladness. Some of us come carrying losses that this day does not undo — an empty seat at the family table, a broken family, years of the locust that we cannot get back, a church that does not look like what we remember in the past. God did not command this day to be a day of cheerfulness. He commanded a day of teruah, and Ezra shows us a teruah with grief in it that was still counted as praise.

So what does it mean that this is the day God named for that sound?

It means the meanings stay open. Had He said shofar, we would be thinking about a horn and about who is qualified to blow it. Because He said teruah, we are made to think about acclamation, about alarm, about a sacrifice offered under pressure, and about a noise in which joy and sorrow cannot be told apart — and all of those belong to this day at once.

It means the day is about a King. The teruah of Numbers 23 is the shout that goes up because the King is present with His people, and the New Testament tells us plainly that the return of Jesus Christ comes with a commanding shout and a trumpet together. Whatever else this day rehearses, it rehearses that.

It means the day asks a question of us that no other appointed time asks quite so directly. Leviticus calls it a memorial — God remembers on this day. Israel at Aphek made an enormous noise and was not remembered, because the noise was all there was. So the question this afternoon is not whether we can produce the sound. It is whether the thing Balaam saw is true of us: that the Eternal our God is with us, and that is why there is a shout in the camp.

And it also means we are not waiting for the trumpets of this day in silence. Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound. Bring the sacrifice of teruah today — costly, deliberate, offered while the enemies are still round about, mixed with whatever weeping you have brought with you. God has commanded us to shout. He will supply the King in Jesus Christ.